Supremely accomplished exploration of consciousness and connection as an intelligent octopus species is discovered in a marine reserve threatened from all angles. I suspect this may turn out to be a modern classic.

Angua's got itchy feet, Carrot's oblivious, the new dwarf recruit has certain fashion aspirations, Nobbs might be a noble, the Patrician's poisoned, there've been two murders and the golems are acting suspicious. Vimes tackles the whole thing with the usual mounting fury at injustice and cyncism at the ways of the world. I especially liked the swerve at The Name Of the Rose.

This is a ghost story, a tale of supernatural conflict, where all the ghosts that have haunted all his books on the margins or as visions and dreams just come right out and say yeah, we're real. Aaron Hollan Broussard, grieving for the death of his daughter, who is nonetheless hanging around and cleaning his yard for him, is visited by some guys painting a swastika on his barn and two guys with guns stalking round his house at night. He meets a sherrif's deputy with an otherworldly portal in her basement. He sees re-enactoments of an old massacre of a Indian tribe. He tries to do something to save two boys on the wrong path. Other people in their lives have other ideas. I did not know Burke had lost a daughter until I got to the afterword and hoo boy, that packs a punch. The grief and loss are raw and bitter, the despair almost tangible. 

A giant of modern fantasy, Powers mixes history and the fantastic, and this sequel to Stress Of Her Regard has a game of cat and mouse set in London, 1862, as vampires and poets and a vet and an ex-prostitute battle it out and chase each other round in move and counter-move, attack and defense across streets and bridges and rooftops and sewers and genteel dining rooms and, of course, graves. I loved it. Rollicking adventure, vampires that barely recognisable as such bu actually scary and poor wee vulnerable humans getting put through the emotional and physical wringer. Great stuff.

Relistened on audiobook.

It's been so long, I thought this was the one with the big wooden chickens. Was it even chickens? Anyway, I can't remember which one had big wooden possibly-chickens, but this isn't it. Still, feckin brilliant, eh? Somewhere along the way the Discworld books stopped being comic fantasy and became the most sublime modern satire, such that a dark continent rising from the sea is merely the impetus for a lot of action around two nations deciding to have a war because a war is overdue frankly, and any old excuse will suffice. Commander Vimes has other plans, it being his job to keep the peace, after all.

Hired to find some musicians to secure rights to use some of their music in a film, Isaiah Coleridge knows there's more to the case than meets the eye, but carries on regardless because that's what he does. It all ends up being far, far Weirder than even he suspects.

Great the see the Coleridge series continue, and great to see it delve down darker stranger horror-tinged ways.

Iain M Banks went off and wrote a few non-Culture sf books just to prove he could, and what we got was a dazzling, baroque novel about a moribund future Earth about to be swamped by an interstellar dust cloud and the efforts of various parties to activate ancient defense systems which, if they actually exist, may save the day, while the ruling elite for reasons of their own, work to thwart these efforts. The book is also notable because fully one third of it is spelled fonetikly, with the result that it's best read in a Scottish accent and probably some sort of literary joke about Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. It's utterly brilliant.

Re(listen) - huh. It's a cyberpunk novel.

Vimes goes to Uberwald, home of dwarves and werewolves and vampires, where a new king is about to be crowned, which is somehow connected to a theft and murder back at Ankh Morpork. Vimes teeters on the brink of being overburdened with moral authority in this one, always a risk with a recurring character who has gone from struggling to do the right thing to having succesfully imposed a functioning version of the right thing on everyone around him. Still, beng hunted naked through the snow by Angua's werewolf family keeps him humble. Makes me realise the sheer genius of the introduction of young Sam and Where's My Cow in Thud - keeps Vimes properly grounded.

There's nothing like the end of the world to focus the mind, so when the date for armageddon is fixed by a catastrophe in the sky, all effort is bent towards saving the human race, or some small part of it anyway. There follows a great deal of technical exposition about surviving in space, and for the most part it's a riveting story, but those technical explanations - and, to be fair, technical explanations tend to be the stuff of hard sf - do go on and on, delaying the action of the story, sometimes suspensefully, sometimes, not so much. Anyhow, it's a grand project against all odds, a titanic effort of will and intellect and expertise and character and vision and all that good stuff ramped up as only the impending extinction of the human race can achieve. It did remind me of some Niven-Pournelle books that I enjoyed back in the day, albeit reminding me that I don't have a huge amount of time for that sort of book any more.

Then, two thirds of the way through, it jumps ahead 5,000 years for a tour of the massive engineering projects that have been completed since the end of the world, not to mention the results of various genetic and social engineering projects. Epic in scale, but again, I just wanted more of the story. An argument could be made that the engineering was part of the story, but c'mon. I did enjoy it, but too much of the time I felt I was tackling it rather than reading it.

Relistened, and yes did kind of zone out for more of the tech stuff than I'm confortable admitting BUT it also used Ireland as a unit of measurement twice, and I just saw somone say that Storm Hilary, about to hit Mexico and California, is the size of Ireland, so it's not a lot but it is odd that it happened three times in one day.

Spooky creepy tale of a small town in a heatwave where a priest tries to do his best with and for his friends and neighbours, while across the country a car picks up odd passengers and heads for the town, leaving destruction in its wake. It's the eve of the Millennium and in some ways it all seems a bit tame and understated, to be honest, especially compared with the last few years - we've had Death, War, Pestilence and whichever one is in charge of climate change to contend with - but it's a nice slow character-driven build to a fiery climax that marks the start of the quartet.